On Sun, Oct 23, 2005 at 12:51:15PM -0700, Thomas Bushnell BSG wrote:
> Anthony Towns <aj@azure.humbug.org.au> writes:
> > Going too far on the "consistency" side of things makes working on
> > alternative OSes pointless: if Debian GNU/Linux and Debian GNU/Hurd do
> > the exact same thing, why bother putting in the effort to have both?
> > Would you say that "tar" shouldn't have special options on the Hurd for
> > dealing with dereferencing translators, say, even if someone wrote
> > such a feature? [0]
> No, the point is that the Hurd developers should write that feature in
> the standard tar so that it can be turned on and off with a normal
> configure test,
Well, why not say "the Hurd developers should write that feature in the
standard Linux kernel so that it can be turned on and off by loading or
removing a module" ?
Obvious reason: because it's more effort than it's actually worth.
> > That doesn't make sense to me. The default install should be what's most
> > likely to be most useful for the most users. If having an option
> > available will be useful on Linux, but not on the Hurd, it should be
> > available on Linux, and not on the Hurd.
> Of course. So let's have one ping package that provides the feature
> on systems where the headers say "yes, we have this feature."
Sure. If you're willing to write and maintain such a package, that's
great, and I'm all for it being the default. Of course, such a package
doesn't actually exist, and you presumably not going to actually write
one, and Noah seems to offering a version that, while portable, doesn't
"always work with the latest and greatest kernel functionality", via a
configure test or not.
Cheers,
aj